gabriel
New
For example, members of this forum can (and frequently do) react sceptically to all sorts of ideas/phenomena, but if they just adopt a broad-brush scepticism and make disparaging references to 'woo' then Alex or I step in. Banning is, however, the ultimate sanction.
The problem was this site became increasingly prescriptive about what ideas represented genuine scepticism, and what were bundled together as varieties of fundamentalism. This is a common problem with sites that aspire to equal opportunities scepticism. As example Fortean-ism was popularly defined as an interest in strange phenomena and a suspicion of official explanations of any kind. While that is an admirable aspiration, its public face has become a studied cynicism towards the weird and an assumption that any anomalies are in perception, not "reality". It foregrounded Charles Fort's wryness and viewed it through the prism of general scorn.
If enough people don't get something, the not-getting becomes the new orthodoxy and the original notion becomes transgressive. In this way funding for the academic study of strange phenomena is converted into the study of why people believe in such phenomena, which is obviously a different kettle of fish. It plays to the standard assumption that people are intrinsically flawed, and it's various ideological corollaries. Encompassing challenges is clearly a very good thing, nudging people from complacent assumptions of all kinds. However it doesn't take long to recognise lifestyle scepticism as less applied rigour, and more directed sophistry, a rhetorical deconstruction, not an attempt at finding the truth, even conditionally. the opposite also holds true, and dots can be joined over any distance and Rorschach blots become a detailed topography.